Part Five: The Arrival
The paramedics came through the forest on foot, following Max’s directions relayed through the dispatcher — four of them, moving quickly with equipment bags and a portable warming kit, their high-visibility jackets visible between the trees long before they arrived. Harold watched Max wave to guide them in, standing on the path with his arms raised, and thought that this boy was going to be all right in the world.
The lead paramedic — a woman named Andrea, experienced and efficient, whose expression when she saw the wolf registered first as alarm, then as trained suppression of alarm, then as something approaching disbelief — took the baby from Harold’s arms and began the assessment with quick, practiced hands. She called back to her colleagues. More warming, glucose, monitoring equipment.
“How long ago did you find her?” she asked, not looking up.
“About twenty-five minutes,” Harold said. “She was under the wolf. The wolf was keeping her warm.”
Andrea looked up at him then. She looked at the wolf, still lying between the pines, Max now sitting a little closer to it than before. She looked back at Harold.
“Under the wolf,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
She processed this in the way that medical professionals process information that doesn’t fit their existing categories — quickly, efficiently, filing it for later examination while keeping the present task primary. “The baby’s breathing is shallow but regular,” she said. “Core temperature is low but she’s not in immediate crisis. You kept her warm — that was the right thing.” She paused. “You probably saved her life.”
“The wolf saved her life,” Harold said. “We just called it in.”
Andrea looked at the wolf again. Max had taken off his outer jacket — the red one he wore everywhere, the one he had been wearing since September and would wear until Harold’s daughter physically removed it from his wardrobe in spring — and had laid it, carefully and gently, against the wolf’s side. Not over the wound. Beside it. Warmth, offered in the only way available.
The wolf had not objected. It lay with its head on the leaves and its amber eyes almost closed, and Max sat beside it with his hand resting very lightly on the fur of its uninjured shoulder, and this was the image that Harold carried out of the forest with him and kept for the rest of his life with the particular, irreducible quality of things that are simply, completely true.
One of the other paramedics had been on her radio. She came to Harold and said, quietly, that she had called the wildlife rescue service — that a veterinary response unit could be there within forty minutes.
Harold nodded. He looked at Max.
Max had not moved.
“Forty minutes,” Harold told him.
Max looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed but he wasn’t crying — he had gone past the stage of crying into something more serious and quiet. “Okay,” he said. He looked back at the wolf. “Okay. We’ll stay.”
